The CSI:NY Alphabet
by La Guera
Summary: Danny fears the future; Stella fears the past; Flack fears his blindness; Adam fears the shadows in his past and the bruises he can't hide. Samantha Flack fears the bottle and the fire it holds; And Mac, ever the soldier, fears for them all.
1. A is for Aiden: The Road Not Taken

**Disclaimer: **All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N: **Welcome to the CSI:NY alphabet acrostic. Each story will have a character or theme that begins with a letter from the Roman alphabet. Each story may be read separately from the others. It is my goal to write a fic a day until Christmas, but we shall see.

**There are major SPOILERS for 509, "The Box". **If you do** not **want to be spoiled, do not read any further.

A is for Aiden. He thinks of her often, though never when he expects it. He'd thought, after she died, that he would know the days when she would haunt him most, the hours. The first anniversary of her murder, he'd braced himself, held his breath in anticipation, sure that he would see her everywhere. He'd taken his glasses off on the subway ride to the crime lab and tucked his chin into his windbreaker, tried to hide among the jostling, swaying bodies and the musty, dusty tang of bodies and grainy, grey newsprint. He'd thought that if he were blind, he wouldn't be able to see her peering at him from windows and from shadowy corners.

He needn't have worried, as it turned out. He hadn't seen her that day. Not in the lab, flitting through the dim, sepulchral corridors in her white lab coat turned shroud, stark white against the dull, grey concrete. Not even at Sullivan's after shift, where he and Flack had gone to chase away the ghosts of the job with pints of beer and Guinness. No Aiden in the old-world gloom of oak and mahogany, no dark hair and white teeth and throaty laugh. No whisper against the sensitive shell of his ear just before the clack and chatter of pool balls drowned out the world.

_I'm outta your league, Messer._ No laughter like smoke and rye to dance along his spine and hint at roads not taken. He's thought about that laugh since then, turned it over in his mind from the safety of a barstool or the steam-fogged sanctuary of the shower, and God knows he regrets those roads that now can never be traveled.

She hadn't turned up when she was expected, a prim and proper Victorian ghost, and looking back, he wonders why he'd ever thought she would. Aiden had been a free spirit in life, a woman who'd respected her oaths and honored them, but who'd never been afraid to tell the world to kiss her Brooklyn ass. Aiden would come, if she came, when she was damn good and ready, and not a minute before. Nobody was going to rush her. Not even Messer. She was dead, and the dead were beholden to no one; the dead had little use for the schedule of the living. They had nothing but time.

She comes, of course. She always comes. Just never when he expects. She comes while he's singing in the shower, head full of shampoo and throat full of Soundgarden or Rush. She rustles the clear, plastic shower curtain, curls her fingers around its warped, slick edge and tells him he sounds like a cat being neutered with a pair of rusty pliers. She laughs when she says it, and promises not to tell Flack about his secret stash of Tesh CDs under the bed. She's gone by the time he steps out of the shower, but sometimes he thinks he sees the outline of her hand in the steam and condensation on the limp curtain. Just for a minute, and then it's gone, too, and he's just some asshole standing naked in his bathroom and blinking at a cheap shower curtain.

She comes to scenes sometimes, hovers just beyond the flapping yellow tape or crouches beside him while he documents trace or collects tissue samples. She never speaks, just watches, eyes thoughtful inside her face as he tweezes microscopic bits of someone's husband or daughter from the sidewalk or plucks it from the thick pile carpeting of a Manhattan penthouse. Sometimes her lips purse, and he knows she's spotted something important, but when he raises his eyebrows in inquiry and entreaty, she simply shakes her head.

_Sorry, Messer. You're on your own._ He could strangle her when she does that, but then he remembers that the last time he saw her neck, it had been so much charred bone in Stella's gloved hands. Then he wishes he could take the thought back. He drops his gaze before she can see the shame there, and when he looks up again, she's gone.

She comes whenever he has chicken parmesan, slips into his mouth on the steam and oils the taste of cheese and sauce and chicken with memories of her. Of sitting in her apartment with a plate of parm in front of him and listening to her rant about bureaucracy and dirtbag lawyers. Of sitting there with his elbows on the table and watching her work her magic with her grandmother's recipe. Of sitting on the couch or the front stoop of her building with a bottle of beer and trading war stories about jobs and brothers. No matter where he goes, the chicken parmesan is never as good as when she made it, and sometimes he wishes he could stop eating it because each mouthful only makes him angry and fills his belly with a dull heaviness, a sadness that won't leave him when the food does a few hours later. But he doesn't stop, because he's convinced that if he ever tastes a parm as good as hers, he'll be able to raise her from the dead, brush the soot and ash from her hair and remember what it's like to feel the sun on his face. If that's too much to ask, at least he can bury her once and for all, a little more with every bite until only peace remains.

Lindsay tried to make parm once. He prefers not to think about it.

Aiden hasn't come since Lindsay moved into his life and brought Montana with her. He doesn't know why. Maybe the wide-open spaces of Bozeman had left too little space for her in his cramped apartment. Maybe she'd gotten tired of being crammed into the closet, a relic from a past he'd rather forget. Or maybe she thought he didn't need her anymore, that dry, dusty Montana kisses were medicine enough for what ailed him.

Oh, but they aren't. Not anymore. If he's honest, they never were, but his hindsight has always far exceeded his foresight, and let's face it, pleasure and pain are one and the same at the hard, ugly bottom. It's a matter of perspective. Even a cut feels good in the instant before the insulted nerves sound the alarm and bring the pain down like a hammer, warm and liquid and burning with undeniable life. It had even felt good when the Irish mobster had shattered his hand with the butt of his gun and ground the broken bones. A moment, just a moment, white-hot and all-consuming, but for that moment, he'd been alive in every nerve ending from scalp to sole, clinging to life with every fiber and indifferent to the countless sins he carried. They'd been obliterated by the will to live. Then the perverse pleasure had passed, and the ordinary agony of survival had set in like a cramp and made him weep with frustration. Pleasure is epiphany. Pain is the dirty work of healing.

Lindsay's medicine is bitter going down, hot and sour and laced with poison. Her kisses cut and bruise and sting, but there comes no healing ache behind them, no tickling stitch of renewal. She forgives only to acquire an impossible debt, and even if he works a thousand lifetimes, it will never be paid. Her kisses take and leave nothing behind but shame and regret and a yawning emptiness that makes him feel light-headed.

He wishes Aiden were here, because he knows now what Lindsay has done with her kisses, what she's done with everything he's missing. She's taken it into herself and built a human tether, a tiny, helpless anchor with fingers and toes and a sparrow's heartbeat. He's got the proof tucked into the pocket of his jacket, protected from the wind. Even now, he wants to protect it, to ensure that he does it no harm, does better by it than he did by Reuben Sandoval, who's never going to ride a bike again. Maybe if he'd lived, he would've ridden a bike like this someday, three hundred horses and chrome to the end of the world. Now he's not riding anything but a pine box, and somewhere out there, a woman who's too good for him by half wishes him well instead of spitting on his future grave. It's more than he deserves.

Maybe the shadow in his pocket is simply a balancing of the scales. A curse for a blessing. Or maybe it's a blessing he just can't see yet because it's too far ahead of him. There's no way for him to know.

Aiden would know. Aiden knew everything that mattered. Aiden knew when he was full of shit and when he was scared and when to just let him be. Aiden would know what to do now, but he's lost sight of her, and no matter where he looks, she never comes into focus. He hasn't even heard her voice in months, and he's beginning to think she's finally gone, driven out by choking Montana dust. If so, he's got no one to blame but himself.

Of all the things he's lost over the years, left behind in a mad dash to the next big thing or impossible dream, he'd never thought to lose her, never wanted to. But the spaces she once occupied have vanished, buried beneath Montana dirt and dead children and phantoms from the future captured on a cheap sonogram.

The thought hurts, makes him want to lean over the side of his bike and retch, heave guilt and leave it on the asphalt like an oil slick, but instead, he straightens and leans on the throttle. The road unspools in front of him. He can't outrun the truth in his pocket. It's too late and too cheap, and he'd be a sorry bastard if he tried, but maybe he can outrun the rest of it, for a while, anyway.

And maybe if he runs hard enough, he'll run right into Aiden, sitting on the stoop of her building with a beer in one hand and a smile on her face.

_C'mon, Danny, _she'll say, and shake her head. _You look like shit. When was the last time you ate? Get your ass in here. You won't be of use to anybody if you go collapsin' at a crime scene. Mac'd have your ass._

She'd finish the beer in three long swallows, and jerk her head towards the door. _Inside before you fall down. I got a chicken parm in the oven._

She'll stand up and brush the grit from her jeans, and he'll follow her inside because there's no place like home, and Aiden's apartment is the closest thing to home he's ever had. He'll sit in the kitchen with his elbows on the table, and she won't yell at him because she's too busy recreating heaven on earth. He'll watch her cook, and maybe he'll have a beer, and while he's waiting, he'll study the line of her back and wonder about the road not taken, and when he comes home, belly full of chicken parm and beer, it won't be Lindsay he smells on the pillow.

It's only a dream, and an unattainable one at that, but it's his, and he refuses to let it go, not when he's already left so much behind. He tucks it into his pocket beside the picture, pats it once for safekeeping, and lets the road lead him.


	2. B Is For Bullies

B is for bullies. It is also for bruises and broken bones. Adam doesn't think that's a coincidence as much as a correlation. He has no empirical evidence with which to back that assumption, no catalogue of brain scans, no spreadsheets whose numbers quantify the rage behind a striking fist or the fear that cowers in the heart of a cornered victim, a rabbit run to ground by the lethal shadow of a circling hawk.

No, no hard evidence. But he's got plenty of anecdotal evidence. He's spent plenty of his nights in the emergency room, slouched in a stiff, vinyl chair that baked beneath fluorescent lights while a doctor with a face the color of slate worked behind the curtain to undo the damage caused by a fist or a plate or a book, the great and powerful Oz putting the scarecrow together again and holding her stuffing inside with gauze and the miracle of dissolving stitches. Sometimes, she moaned, the scarecrow, and sometimes she cried softly, the sobs thick and bloody as they passed through her swollen lips like sputum, but the wizard never said anything, never offered a token word of comfort. The wizard had seen it all before, and there were graver wounds to which he must soon turn his attention, wounds unexpected and unearned. Besides, the wizard had known such words were of little use, mist upon a raging fire, and so he had not wasted them, not on a scarecrow determined to sink roots into her poisoned field. He'd simply written her a prescription for Demerol and turned her out with a haggard, speculative look at him as he'd sat in the comfortless chair and tried not to scuff the toes of his sneakers on the tired, green linoleum.

He tells himself he can't remember the first time his father hit his mother, and maybe that's true as far as it goes; it's likely that the first blow came long before he was born. For all he knows, he _caused _the first bruise, the first fat lip or stinging cheek, a startling swell of unanticipated obligation inside his mother's belly that had moved his father's hand to anger and roused in him a love of ruthless dominion. Maybe he was the straw that broke his father's patience and his mother's jaw in three places. He doesn't like to think about that, but sometimes he can't do anything but. It's the job. It harrows the fertile soil of his conscience and reveals things he'd rather not see, exposes them to the light and lets them breathe their stale yet potent truths into his face like gris gris dust from the palm of a grinning houngan. And once they're above the ground, there's nothing else for it but to look them straight on, and so he does.

So maybe he doesn't remember the day his father became a bully, a bruiser of faces and breaker of bones, but he does remember the first time he saw the monster for himself. He'd been four and playing with his Hot Wheels and Micro Machines on the parlor floor. The parlor floor had been his favorite place to play with his cars because the wood had been smooth and dark, kept spotless by the polish his mother applied twice a week, crawling across the expanse of the room on her hands and knees with a cleaning chamois in one hand and a bottle of Old English in the other. The smooth, flat, dark wood had lent itself to any landscape his imagination could conjure-the serpentine ribbon of a dirt road, the muddy, brown water of the Mississippi, or maybe the Nile as it wound its way to Lake Tanganyika and the broad, lush delta that fed Egypt, the red, trackless surface of Mars, or perhaps one of the numberless planets explored by the space cowboys of _Battlestar Galactica. _That day, he'd been a daredevil, Rad Ross, and he'd used the blocks to build a ramp and obstacle course for his squadron of tiny toy cars.

He'd been at it for a while, putt-putting and vrooming around the living room, his imagined awesomeness aided by fat, vibrato plips from his mouth. Two cars in his fleet had made the jump, much to the amazement and delight of the sellout living room crowd, and he'd been reaching for a third when he'd heard the first uneasy stirrings of an argument from the kitchen. His mother had been in there most of the morning, cleaning and preparing lunch, but now, his father had been there, too, voice low and ominous, the rumble of distant thunder.

He'd tried to ignore it. His father's voice had never comforted him, but the thunder-voice had frightened him, made his belly flutter with a nameless, greasy fear that had made his car slick and clumsy in his hand. It was the grating, subterranean voice of the bogeyman who lived in the basement, crouched in his nest behind the washer that shivered and trembled every time his mother did the wash, and who sometimes crept up the stairs to his room to hunker in his closet behind his clothes. Bogeymen came from the dark, bad places of the world, and even at four, he'd understood that fathers shouldn't sound like bogeymen. So he'd crouched in the parlor, balanced on his toes, head down and breath swollen and stale inside his mouth, and prayed for his father to go away.

But the argument had continued, his father talking in that awful, thundery voice and his mother answering in her quiet, subdued one, the thunder and the wind. His father had said something, but the house of his childhood had been old, and the thick walls had smothered the words before they could reach him. Only the cadence had come, the throaty, dangerous grumble of the bogeyman, and Adam had known that if the argument went on much longer, the bogeyman inside his father's clothes would simply reach out and gobble her up.

_Be quiet, Mommy, _he'd thought. _Be quiet and run far, far away as fast as you can, like that little piggy that screams all the way home. _Then, dreamily, _Fe fi fo fum. _The thunderous voice of a giant with a taste for bones.

But his mother had not been quiet, had gone on talking, and he'd wondered why grownups could never see the monster until it was too late. Maybe it was because they were too old to be scared, or maybe it was because the monsters lived knee-high to their chosen prey and thus went unseen by eyes set too far above the ground. His mother had been face to face with the bogeyman, and he'd known as he'd crouched in the parlor with a car in his steadily-slackening fingers that she couldn't see it, wouldn't see it until it was too late to do anything but scream.

He'd been tempted to hide, to secret himself in the hall closet and huddle behind the umbrellas and the raincoats that hung from hooks like stretched hides. But the thunder-voice had been possessed of a terrible magic, and he'd been rooted to the spot, held in thrall by the rumble of approaching doom. And deep in his heart, he'd been afraid that if he moved, the bogeyman would eat him instead, a tasty morsel of boy meat with which to slake his hunger. So he'd stayed and waited for the storm to either break or pass.

"I don't think-," his mother had said. It's a phrase he remembers quite clearly, one he brings up with him from the deep well of sleep, a dismal warning half-remembered by the time he wipes the crusty caul of sleep from his eyes and forgotten by the time his feet touch the floor. _I don't think-_

"I don't think-," she'd repeated. Then, "No!" Shrill and thin. "No, please-,"

A dull, meaty crack, followed by a thud and the tinkling crash of shattering crockery. The car had slid from his fingers, squirted loose like a small, struggling animal and clattered to the floor. If it had landed wheels-down, it might have rolled across the floor, but it had landed wheels-up and had lain at his feet like a dead insect. He'd stared stupidly at it, reached down and idly prodded its cheap plastic undercarriage. It had been stiff and cool, a beetle carapace, and he'd jerked his finger back in unreasoning distaste. The sudden movement had unbalanced him, and he'd swayed drunkenly on his toes.

_Don't fall, _he'd thought. _If you fall, he'll come for you._

He'd risen on unsteady legs. The house had been quiet. The thunder and wind had stilled, but somehow that had brought no comfort. The air had still been curiously hot and thick with the promise of another squall. He'd blinked to clear his eyes, and his mouth had tasted of metal and brine, lightning on the tip of his tongue.

He hadn't wanted to move. Instinct had whispered that it was safer to remain where he was, silent and unmoving, unseeing and unseen until the bogeyman had gone and taken his thunder-voice with him. But terror had carried with it an irresistible, groggy curiosity, the desire of the doomed to see the face of their death, and so he'd lurched into hesitant, rubber-legged motion. His legs had prickled and sizzled with the return of unhindered circulation, and he'd done a queer, stumbling jig to the threshold.

For a moment, the only sound to reach his ears had been the furtive _whump _of his pudgy, bare feet on the cool, smooth wood, but as he'd drawn closer to the kitchen, he'd heard an odd, snuffling keening, the pitiful mewl of a dying kitten. _Mrew. Mmmrew. M-m-mmreww. _The sound had raised gooseflesh on his arms, and he'd slowed his advance, reluctant to see the source of the noise.

_Mmmrew. Mreewww. M-m-mrew. _Quailing and pitiful, and his chest had constricted with the threat of tears, with the ill-advised lunacy of noise.

Then the bogeyman had spoken, the grinding, seismic rumble of shifting earth, and all thought of crying had died on the vine, withered in the stark, ruthless light of self-preservation. It was a light, he would think when he was older and safely jaded, that bore a startling resemblance to the fluorescent lights of hospital emergency rooms.

"Stop it now," the bogeyman had warned. "You stop that noise now."

The mewling had stuttered to an abrupt stop, replaced by a glottal, gurgling slurp that had reminded him of the roiling boil of the water with which his mother made her beef stock. Thick and soupy, gelatin and dissolving bone.

_It's Mommy, _a small voice had whispered inside his head. _That's what it sounds like when the monsters eat you. The bogeyman's put her in the soup pot and is boiling her bones for his stew. Fe fi fo fum._

He'd had a vision of his mother bobbing in her soup pot, fingers curled over the side and eyes and nose poking over the metal rim, a wet, wide-eyed Kilroy in her own kitchen. Her brown hair had clung to her scalp, plastered there by the steam and flecks of boiling water thrown up by the pot, and the ends had boasted bits of carrot and potato peel. Celery had kissed her upper lip like mucus, green and viscous. Her lips had twisted in a smile, and she'd waggled her fingers at him in a fragile gesture of reassurance, but before he could respond, the vision had burst like a bubble atop the pot's rolling boil, punctured by the resumption of that terrible keening.

"I'm not going to tell you again," the bogeyman had said, and Adam had willed his mother to stop, because he could hear the reptilian creak of opening jaws.

But his mother hadn't stopped, or maybe she couldn't, and there had been a second meaty slap. A sharp, helpless cry of pain, and then ragged, reedy breaths.

He'd peered around the doorframe of the kitchen in time to see his father the bogeyman looming over his mother, who'd sat, shrunken and huddled, in the incongruously chummy embrace of the right angle formed by the kitchen counter. Her hair had been a disheveled frazzle around her blotchy, tearstained face, and one hand had clutched her cheek. She'd still been holding a dishrag, and the dingy, white fabric hanging from her clutching hand had made it look as though her cheek had slipped from its mooring on her cheekbone. She'd stared up at his father with an expression of surprise and naked terror. Her free hand had lain limply in the puddle of her skirt, and in the center of her palm had been a small, glistening, white fragment. He'd blinked at it in logy incomprehension, had wondered why she was cradling a lump of gristle. He hadn't realized it was her tooth until weeks later, when she'd smiled and revealed an unfamiliar void.

There'd been nothing of his father in the face that had gazed dispassionately down at her. Just the red, mottled face of the bogeyman, with dead eyes and spittle-flecked lips. His father's hands had hung loosely at his side, the fingers of his right hand the curved and deadly fangs of a serpent. The fingers had twitched delicately, as though they'd not yet spent the entirety of their venom, and he'd shrunk from the scene involuntarily, mesmerized by the sight of those twitching fingers and his mother's stricken face.

_He didn't eat her, _he'd thought as he'd retreated to the safety of the parlor, where his toy cars had been strewn haphazardly across the floor, the victims of a multi-car accident. The crowd had gone home, and only carnage had remained. _He didn't gobble her up, not this time, but he bit her really hard. He'll eat her sooner or later, though. The monsters always do._

His father the bogeyman had left shortly thereafter, had stalked out the front door and down the front steps, bound for the secret places monsters went when they got tired of their grownup costumes. Adam hadn't breathed until he'd heard the glassy, coughing roar of his father's work truck, and when it had faded into silence, he'd gathered his cars and blocks and carried them upstairs to his room. He hadn't wanted to be Rad Ross, daredevil, anymore. He'd tossed his cars into his toy box and crawled into his bed, where he'd hidden in a nest of clean, white sheets until his mother had called him to lunch, peanut butter and jelly on bread that had gone hard from exposure to air. His mother had smiled at him with fat, rubbery lips and run her fingers through his hair, and if she'd noticed that he was white as the bread he'd been eating, she'd never said so. She'd just returned to the kitchen to start dinner.

No broken bones that time, just a black eye and fat lips and a swollen cheek and a shattered bicuspid that the family dentist had replaced with a ceramic one a year later.

His father had hit him for the first time when he was seven. He doesn't remember why, though he has a vague recollection of leaves in the yard and a rubber ball round and ripe as a cherry tomato. His father had whipped him with his belt, pulled it from the loops of his Levis and brought it down like a lash. He doesn't remember the pain so much as the queer, humiliating sense of violation as that strip of leather had lapped at his flesh like an eager, alien tongue, the sense of helpless exposure. He remembers the shame, too, a deep, frosty ache underneath his burning skin. He remembers the monster's kiss.

There'd been broken bones that time, but not his. His mother, who had no courage for herself, had summoned it to save him, and she'd paid for it with three cracked ribs and a broken arm. His father's feet had sounded like drums as they'd sunk into her ribcage, and his mother had screamed when her arm had broken. She'd never screamed before, never howled and scuttled away on her three remaining limbs, coughing weakly and dripping snot into the leaves he'd forgotten to rake. He'd been too stunned to scream, too sickened by guilt to do anything but stand in the yard with his eyes screwed shut and wait for the screaming to stop. Eventually, it had, but he'd kept them closed until the front door had slammed and sealed the bogeyman in his lair.

He'd tried to help his mother up, but she'd screamed when he'd touched her, and so he could do nothing but hover nearby while she'd struggled to her feet and staggered to the car, broken arm cradled against her cracked ribs. She'd driven to the hospital with one arm, hunched over in the driver's seat and crying with every shallow breath. He'd sat in the passenger seat and kept his gaze fixed on the landscape outside the car so she wouldn't see him cry.

They'd gone to see the wizard that night, and he'd waited in the chair while the great and powerful Oz had put her stuffing back in. It had been harder to do that time, and she'd moaned while the wizard worked his magic. It had taken her a long time to emerge from behind the curtain; the wizard had wanted her to stay overnight, but his mother had refused. She'd been afraid of what his father might do if she were gone that long and even more afraid of sending Adam home alone with him. If she did that, then Adam might disappear into the mists of nowhere, spirited away by his spiteful bogeyman father or snatched by the specter of DHS and banished to the loveless exile of foster care. So, she'd gathered her things and run from the bland sanctuary of the hospital, the prescription for Vicodin pinched carefully in her hand.

He'd looked back at the wizard as his mother had led him from the triage station. The wizard had been old and tired, grey and stooped as he'd peeled off his gloves and tossed them into the waiting gullet of the trashcan marked BIOHAZARD in blocky, black letters. He hadn't looked at Adam.

_When are you gonna put my stuffing back in, Mr. Wizard?_ he'd thought desperately. _Mine's all falling out, too. _But the wizard hadn't heard him, had already been turning toward another supplicant, pulling a fresh pair of gloves from the pocket of his rumpled coat.

He'd hoped that his mother would get into the car and drive anywhere but home, would flee from the bogeyman and start anew in a distant town. They could change their names, shed the taint of the bogeyman, and she could be a teacher again, like she'd been before she'd fallen into the bogeyman's trap. He'd never be able to be Rad Ross, but that was okay by him. He could pick out a better name, and when he became famous, no one would ever know that his father was the bogeyman.

But there'd been nowhere to go but home, and that's where they'd gone. Two days later, his mother had been on her hands and knees, polishing the parlor floor inch by painful inch. She'd cried from the pain of her abused ribs, had stopped and pressed her forehead to the floor and cried in hitching, shallow gasps while her arm throbbed in its plaster. It had taken her three hours to polish the floor, but she'd done it, and when she was finished, she'd vomited into the kitchen sink and turned on the garbage disposal until the mess was gone.

He'd never stopped hoping that his mother would find the courage to leave the bogeyman, but she never had. His magic had been too strong and her fear too great. She'd sunk her roots into the soil of her chosen homestead and let the monster bruise her and break her bones. There had been other broken bones, too many to count, and with them had come lessons, lessons earned with every slap and kick and punch, etched into blood and bone with screams and hastily muffled sobs.

Chief among these lessons was the necessity of invisibility, of being a secret keeper, and so he's surprised when he says to Danny and Stella, "Maybe she had a bully in her life."

He's surprised and embarrassed by his uncharacteristic slip. It's not a secret he'd ever intended to tell, not to anyone, much less to the people with whom he spends so much time, people who make their living unearthing the seedy, hidden truths of other people's lives. He hopes the remark has passed unnoticed, but he knows better.

He sinks lower in his seat and waits for the moment to break, but it never does. It just spins out. Danny and Stella are watching him; Danny's gaze is contemplative and more than a trifle knowing, and that surprises him not at all. Danny is a member of the walking wounded, too, but unlike Adam, who's survived by becoming invisible, he's survived by fighting back, by bluffing when he can and baring his teeth when he can't. Danny's got a bogeyman to call his own, and Adam's willing to bet that if he were to catch a glimpse of Danny's monster, he'd see the family resemblance to the one that crouches in his closet on the bad nights and presides over the family table on worse holidays.

Stella's gaze is no less intense, but it's softer, filled with a dawning suspicion and a sympathy that he can't stand. It's too close to pity, too close to the sorrowful, useless glances of the nurses at the triage station who'd watched him and his mother limp into the world with their stuffing bulging in all the wrong places.

He doesn't want Stella to see him like that. He wants her to see him as smart and good at his job, as a scientist and not a wounded child in geek's clothing. So he opens his mouth to offer an insight that will break the case and give him time to regroup, but what comes out is, "My dad was kind of a bully," and in that moment, he could gladly crawl through the monitor and join the space-age shoplifter in her two-dimensional world of high-end merchandise. Danny's expression sharpens, and Stella's deepens, and it's hard to look at either one of them, so he fixes his gaze on the screen in front of him and watches the unknown woman slip a scarf into her handbag.

It's safer not to talk. All his stuffing is spilling out. So he doesn't say a word, no matter how heavy the silence grows. He watches and waits, and at last the subject returns to the case and the woman on the screen, and when it does, he breathes a sigh of relief and does his best to make himself invisible.


	3. C is for Confession

C is for confession, and the worst confession he's ever heard comes, not from the lips of a kiddie fiddler or a family annihilator who'd locked his five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter in the hall closet and listened to them burn along with the body of their mother, but from behind a door left ajar in a run-down building with dim lights and filled with people living even dimmer lives. It's a confession never meant for his ears. He has no right to be here, skulking outside this warped and secret door and peering through the crack in the door at the unfinished faces inside. He's an interloper, an unwanted judgment, and he should've left as soon as he'd realized why she was there, should've turned around and retreated to his well-ordered life and waited for her to choose the hour and the means of her confession. He should leave now, but his knees have gone to water, and his chest throbs, laid bare by the jagged shrapnel of the words that he's so carelessly stolen and now cannot discard. He's afraid that if he moves, he'll waver and then shatter like so much distressed glass, and the noise of his dissolution will bring her to the door.

He doesn't think he could stand to see her eyes right now, not if they're anything like the voice drifting from behind the door like ground mist to curl around his heart and smother it with formless, frozen fingers. They'd be cloudy with booze, glazed with pain, and bright with the knowledge of everything he'd somehow missed. He doesn't want to look into her eyes and discover there's nothing behind them, that she's been hollowed out by the slow, patient burn of alcohol. To do that would be to see how badly he's failed.

They'd been close once upon a time, close enough to share a pair of headphones on family vacations. They'd sat cheek to cheek in the back of the family Corolla and listened to Peter Gabriel, bony, adolescent shoulders occasionally jousting for dominance as the old car lumbered around curves or labored up hills on the way to weekends in the Catskills or Rockaway Beach. Sometimes, Sam had initiated a good-natured shoving match in a bid to win the whole headset for herself, along with the chance to hear Peter in stereo. Not often, though, because their old man's patience had a habit of getting dangerously thin on long car trips, and they'd learned through hard experience that his threat to chuck "that fucking Walkman gadget" out the window if they didn't cut that shit out wasn't an idle one. Sam's first Walkman had met its maker on the unyielding shoulder of an interstate exit ramp on the outskirts of Beaverkill, catapulted from the driver's side window by his father's beefy fist. It had shattered like a hand grenade, shards of plastic and the slick innards of Peter Gabriel bouncing and rolling over the blurry asphalt like deadly, modern shrapnel, the vengeance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a technological scale. He'd been fascinated in spite of his indignation at the loss of his favorite tape. Sam had been furious.

"Shoulda done like I told you and cut it out," was all their old man had said when Sam had protested her tape player's fate. Sam had sulked all the way to the family timeshare, slouched in the backseat with her skinny arms folded beneath her blossoming breasts. Dad had hummed Beach Boys tunes under his breath and drummed his thick fingers on the steering wheel.

Sam's Walkman hadn't been replaced until that Christmas, when Santa's little helper had upgraded it to a Discman and left it underneath the tree, wrapped with a Peter Gabriel CD. His folks had sworn they had nothing to do with it, but Sam had thrown her arms around their father's neck and spent the afternoon belting out "Red Rain" in her uneven contralto. When Don had asked to borrow the Discman for the subway ride to work, she'd smirked and flipped him the bird. Santa's little helper had gone to work in silence the next morning, ears protected from the December chill by a pair of secondhand earmuffs handed down from an older cousin.

He hadn't gotten a Gabriel CD to call his own until two years later, when he'd left home for the academy and traded his cramped but cozy boyhood bedroom for an equally cramped and decidedly uninviting room in the academy dormitories. That small, silver disc had been a comforting taste of home during the grueling rigors of his training, a reassuring touchstone whenever the weight of his father's gilded, golden boy legacy had threatened to smother him and drive him to the safer and secretly coveted occupation of chef. Peter had kept his nose to the grindstone and his shoulders in the harness, and he'd played "Red Rain" until the melody and lyrics had embedded themselves in his brain, been matched to his biorhythms and become a second heartbeat. On his graduation from the academy, "Red Rain" had been his "Pomp and Circumstance", an internal soundtrack that had carried him through the solemn ceremony on a wave of euphoria.

_That's what I'm doin' this for, who I'm doin' this for,_ he'd thought as he'd stood at parade rest in his dress blues, gloved hands clasped loosely behind his back and his newly-affixed badge gleaming proudly on his chest. The song had reverberated inside his head as the commandant and the commissioner had droned endlessly on in a contest to see who could deliver the dullest speech. He'd kept his face to the front, but his eyes had been busily scanning the crowd in search of his family, his people, with whom he shared this busy, grotty, dirty, wonderful patch of earth.

It hadn't been hard to spot them. His father was a legend, after all, and what good was being a legend if you couldn't trade on it to get good seats to see your son make the ceremonial march to join the thin, blue line? They'd been in the middle of the third row of white, wooden seats, his father in his own dress blues and his mother in her church best, a camera clutched in blue-veined hands that had just begun to show the dark stains that would kill her two years later, the calling-card bruises of lymphatic cancer. But they'd been just bruises then, an inevitable consequence of aging, and her hands had been steady enough to snap more photos of him than he could count, steady enough to reverently place ninety percent of those snapshots into albums she'd cherished until she died. She'd been buried with one of those albums, in fact, had gone to the bosom of the earth with pictures of him cradled to her still, cold breast. His father had insisted on it.

Sam had been there, too, and it was Sam he'd really been looking for. There'd been no doubt his parents would attend; they'd had bells on for weeks, and his mother had been down the beauty salon three times that week in preparation, fussing over her nails and nonexistent hairs on her upper lip. But Sam had been seventeen going on eighteen, and the traditions of the job had held no magic for her. She'd been more interested in fast cars and loud music and shady guys in oiled bomber jackets. Her world had revolved around dates and gossip and whose voice was on the other end of the phone line, not spit-polished shoes and Glocks and a five-pointed star on her chest. He'd been worried that she wouldn't come, that she'd blow off the ceremony in favor of running with her girlfriends in Queens, sitting on the hood of a muscle car with the music blaring loudly enough to made the hood thrum with the power of a phantom engine. Maybe she'd sit on the hood in the shorts that Dad called trashy and that Ma called scandalous, offering passing badboy wannabes a glimpse of seventh heaven. But she'd been there, a young willow tree in the shadow of the brass-buttoned oak of their old man, dressed in her best and offering him a glimpse of the beautiful young woman she would soon become, that she'd been becoming that spring of '97.

He'd stood straighter for her, prouder. He'd wanted to be a good example for her. She'd been set to graduate high school a few weeks from then, to engage in some pomp and circumstance of her own and cross a cheap, wooden stage in a plum, satin cap and gown with a rolled diploma in her hand. She'd worked hard and earned that walk and the trip to art school that had waited for her at the end of it, and he'd wanted to show her how good she could have it if she just kept reaching for the stars. He'd wanted to inspire her to chase her dreams, even if they weren't the dreams their folks had dreamed for her when she'd been too young to dream for herself.

Eleven years on, and he's standing in the hallway of a flophouse, listening to his baby sister lay herself open to a group of strangers carrying their demons in their purses and hip pockets, and wondering if the proudest day of his life wasn't the day he'd knocked her from the mountaintop he'd meant to help her reach. The thought is a knifepoint in the center of his chest, and with every breath, it twists and burrows toward his heart. He blinks and swallows, and the saliva catches in his throat, stopped by a hot, glowing coal of guilt and shame.

He'd felt ten feet tall and bulletproof that day on the green, arrayed before the city as the embodiment of its courage and decency, white-gloved and resplendent and secure in the conviction that he could save the world armed with nothing but a service pistol, a baton, and a pair of handcuffs. His father had clapped him on the shoulder and shaken his hand and called him "Officer Flack" with such obvious pride that it had been all he could do to keep his eyes dry. His balls had been in the vicinity of his pounding heart, and both had been high and tight behind the badge. He'd grown hair on his balls at twelve, but his manhood had come to him on a handshake and a five-pointed star of copper and tin.

His mother had wept with joy and hugged him tightly, as though to reattach the apron strings the points of his newly-acquired star had so neatly and finally severed. Sam had cried and hugged him, too, though her tears had been more sedate and her embrace less frantic. At the time, he'd attributed her moist eyes and muted enthusiasm to adolescent hauteur and her desire to maintain her carefully cultivated air of world-weary disinterest in familial affairs. Now he's beginning to suspect that she'd wept, not for joy, but for sorrow. While their parents had celebrated his crowning achievement, Sam had quietly mourned his loss. He had gone where she couldn't follow, had crossed to the other side of the blue divide, and he'd done it without so much as a farewell or a backward glance.

And he'd been too giddy, too stupid, to see it. Oh, but he sees it now, sees it with a clarity that would be perfect were he looking into any other mirror but this one, and it burns, burns like acid and lye and the bits of shrapnel that Dr. Singh had so painstakingly plucked from his gaping belly two long summers ago. He should've seen it long ago, long before it came to this squalid flophouse light years away from the end of the rainbow. A voice in his head demands to know why he didn't, and the good cop in him wants to answer, fumbles for one in the clutter of his stunned mind, but the man in him only shrugs and drops his head in defeat.

Once, long ago, he'd apologized to Stella for being a bit thick. It'd been funny at the time, a shared joke between friends, but from where he's standing, there's nothing funny about it now. It's stupid and dangerous and as lethal as the bullets he dodges every day. He stands in the hallway with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his overcoat like stones and curses the thickness of his head and the unforgivable blindness of his heart. He wonders when the blindness began.

He's tempted to say it began that afternoon on the academy grounds, that the burnish on his badge dazzled him with its brightness and seared itself so deeply into the fabric of his mind that he could see nothing else, but he knows that's not true. It's a comforting, tidy lie, one fashioned by desperation and a hot, needling guilt. He's tempted to accept it anyway, to knead and tease and worry it in his aching, sweaty hands until it's close enough to the truth to soothe his raw, tender conscience, but he doesn't. That's what skels and scumbags do, and Sam deserves better.

The blindness might've reached its zenith on his graduation day, but its origins run through deeper waters. It'd begun far earlier, years before he'd pulled on cotton gloves and a wool uniform cap with a leather brim and marched across the academy grounds in perfect lockstep with hundreds of other fresh-faced graduates with adrenaline in their mouths like liquid ozone and their balls lodged painfully in their puffed-out chests. Its shadow had been spreading over his vision since junior high, when the divisions of gender and temperament had begun to manifest themselves.

He and Sam had been two parts of an indivisible whole once open a time. He'd been the dutiful and protective older brother, and she'd been the devoted and endlessly fascinated younger sister, all pigtails and Barbie dolls. He was three years older, a rambunctious kid with scabby knees and a dirty face, and she'd worshipped him. When they were little, she'd followed him everywhere, a tiny, sticky-faced shadow with lollipop-stained fingers who'd demanded to go wherever he went and to do whatever he did. If their mother gave him a quarter to ride the carousel in Pitkin Park, then Sam wanted one, too, and two quarters were even better. If he clambered to the top of the monkey bars to stand astride them, King Kong at the top of the Empire State Building, she climbed them, too, candy-sticky fingers coated with playground dirt and soot. Even then, Sam had never been content to be the damsel in distress.

The absolute adoration hadn't lasted for either of them. He'd graduated from Scooby Doo to G.I. Joe and the Transformers(though a round or three of Scooby is still his mental comfort food when the cold grey of winter has settled into his bones and browned his thoughts like the scarce leaves that cling to tree branches like wet and sloughing skin), and Sam had traded in her affinity for the monkey bars in favor of Barbies and bows and toy cosmetic kits. He can still remember her lording around the small living room of their Yonkers apartment one Christmas morning with a pink, plastic cosmetics case from their mother. It had been filled with light rouges and clear, flavored lipglosses. She'd spent hours in front of the mirror in their parents' bedroom, smacking her lips together to spread the flavored gel. God knows she'd probably eaten as much as she'd worn.

He'd gotten his first lacrosse stick that Christmas, and he'd booked it down the street to his best friend's house to show it off. He and a group of other neighborhood boys had flaunted their athletic prowess in various pick-up games of basketball and street hockey until dark, and he'd come home with the unmistakable smell of teenage boy rising from his clothes like smoke. Sam had been holed up in her room by then, fashioning the strange and unknowable lives of girls for her new Barbies, who smiled at her with their empty faces and smelled of Cherry Berry lipgloss. He'd shaken the snow from his clothes and stumped into the kitchen for a bowl of hot tomato soup, and it wasn't until he was thawing beneath the steady, pulsing fingers of the shower that he'd realized that he and Sam hadn't spent a single hour together. She'd vanished into her world, and he'd disappeared into his, and never the twain had met.

The ties that bind had begun to fray that year, Clothos' tightly-woven threads stretched by the persistent tug of Kronos' greedy fingers. He'd turned twelve that January, and Prometheus' fire had kindled in his belly and awakened in him the heady knowledge of the differences between boys and girls. His voice had cracked and deepened, broken and tempered by the enormity of his epiphany. Coarse hairs had made their appearance on his balls and around his restless cock, which had begun to twitch and shiver in the grips of an endless fever, and he'd begun to awaken in the night to a sticky, shameful wetness on his belly that had embarrassed and excited him. He'd discovered the clandestine joy of masturbation that February, had tugged himself to frantic, terrifying completion in the shower before bed, and the world had shifted beneath his spasming, inexpert fingers. The scales had fallen from his eyes, and childhood had swirled down the drain in a rush of soap and spent seed.

The complexion and texture of the world had changed. The egalitarianism and asexual fraternity of boyhood had dissolved in a maelstrom of hormones and burgeoning desires. Girls, previously little more than boys with long hair and finer features, had suddenly become exotic enigmas, creatures of lithe limbs and sleek curves that had tantalized him, made him ache and burn with the need to discover the secrets beneath their clothes. He and the neighborhood boys had still played pick-up games in Pitkin Park, but the heretofore friendly games had been fraught with an inexplicable tension that had tightened his belly with a dry-mouthed anticipation that intensified whenever gaggles of girls from the junior and senior high schools had passed, books clutched to their budding or well-developed breasts as though to shield them from avid, unwanted gazes. Elbows and shoulders had grown sharper, become lances and cudgels with which to batter the competition, and when the games were finished and the scrapes and bruises counted, the contented languor of sport had been accompanied by a nagging, heavy restlessness inside his shorts, a sense of undefined want that had settled beneath skin with the proprietary implacability of a remote itch beyond the reach of quelling nails.

Sometimes, there'd been no game, just a parliament of gangle-limbed boys watching the passing girls with magpie interest, attracted by the curve of a hip or the swell of a breast or the gloss of lipsticked lips. They'd watched and coveted, their desire unfocused and feverish even as the images it had conjured had grown sharp and piquant. He'd often perched on the hood of a parked car, his hockey stick or lacrosse net between his legs like a codpiece, and watched the girls sashay past. Sometimes, they'd smiled at him, and the blood had rushed to his cheeks and balls and turned his tongue to rubber in his mouth. Wonder had made him stupid and mute, and he could only wave at them or drop his gaze until they'd passed and taken their power with them.

Once he'd discovered the cult of woman, he'd had time for little else, certainly not for Sam, who'd been nothing but a child, a little girl devoid of curves or voluptuous swells, a figure of dull planes and uneventful straight lines that terminated in blocky feet and too-large hands on the bony stems of her wrists. She'd resembled a living doll with her caked-on lipgloss and obsession with bubble-gum pink nail polish, a thrift store mannequin with splashes of color on fingers and toes. She was his sister, yes, and therefore a girl, but she'd also been oddly asexual, not at all like the anonymous, remote creatures that had so stirred his blood. Familiarity had bred indifferent contempt.

And yet… The familiarity hadn't been absolute; the veneer of asexuality had grown thin with the passage of time, and sometimes he'd caught glimpses of her as she would someday be-a flash of insight trapped in a mirror along with the unexpected and heretofore unnoticed shapeliness of her calf, an unwelcome epiphany illuminated by the sunlight that had found its way through the kitchen window in defiance of the concrete jungle that had sweltered and loomed around the family apartment. Once, when he was fifteen and Sam twelve, they'd been wrestling over the remote, and his batting, grasping hand had accidentally grazed her budding chest. He'd drawn back as though scalded, and his hand had tingled where they'd touched. He'd curled the offending hand into a fist and conceded the battle, his face hot and his heart thundering erratically inside his chest.

"G'on, watch your stupid show," he'd growled, and tucked his clenched fist against his thigh to hide its trembling. Sam had crowed in triumph and stuck her tongue out at him, oblivious to his discomfiture. She'd changed the channel to some godforsaken teen drama and cranked the volume until the television's speakers had buzzed and crackled with alien, electronic voices. He'd known he should tell her to turn it the fuck down before she blew the speakers-Dad would have-but he'd been too stunned by what had happened, too preoccupied by the unwelcome message written on the skin of his fingers. So, he'd settled for tossing a throw pillow at her head in wordless rebuke. She'd casually flipped him the bird, her pink-nailed middle finger an absurdly cheerful flamingo poised above the blunt, white stumps of her knuckles, and he'd stumped upstairs to wash his hands and brush the sour taste from his mouth.

It had been a hard home truth, knowing that his little sister wasn't so little, that beneath her unrevealing child's clothing, she was undergoing a startling metamorphosis and becoming an object of desire. Thanks to the stash of Playboy and Hustler magazines that their father had kept in a wilted cardboard box in the basement, he'd seen what the baggy sweaters and strategically placed schoolbooks had hidden, seen bare breasts and the soft, curly thatch of hair between coquettishly parted legs. These visions had terrified him and filled him with a delicious, predatory ache by turns, and the ache-a delirious, cramping hunger that had sunk its teeth into the tender, overheated flesh of his guts and groin-had often sent him scurrying into the bathroom and the steamy, soapy-fingered sanctuary of the shower.

The hunger had been relentless, a primal, exhilarating forced that had often manifested itself at the most inopportune moments and left him sweaty and unsettled inside his skin while the bulge in his pants had threatened to expose his decidedly unholy train of thought to the harridan spinster nuns who'd presided over his education, rulers and pointers clutched in their blue-veined fists like weapons of war and crosses over their hearts like fragments of body armor. Much as he'd delighted in the hunger for himself, the idea that his baby sister could inspire it in others had appalled him. That the chubby toddler who'd once made mud pies with the contents of her diaper could be the object of some guy's jerkoff fantasy was a possibility he'd been unable to countenance. How could he when he'd known exactly the sordid stuff of those fantasies, had indulged in more than a few under the abetting cover of darkness, teeth gritted against the cry that had tickled his throat like a teasing finger? Not of his sister-Jesus Christ, he'd been a kid, not some pud-pulling pervert-but of the checkout girl at his favorite deli or the big-breasted junior who sat at the table opposite his in the cafeteria or a faceless dream girl of his own creation. He'd fantasized about everyone else's sister, but had never once thought that anyone would dream of his. His sister had been the antithesis of sex appeal, a child of snakes and snails and puppy dogs' tails in a body much too big and ungainly for her, and he'd wanted her to stay that way forever, a grinning little girl protected from the secret, midnight lives of boys.

But what he'd wanted hadn't mattered in the face of the truth underneath her shirt. She'd gone right on growing up. The sweaters had filled out and their mother had begun to buy enough tampons and maxi pads for two, and because he couldn't stop it, he'd avoided it and retreated to the safety of the familiar. He'd lost himself in sports and neighborhood friendships and the pursuit of other brothers' sisters, and Sam had receded to a familiar but distant speck on the periphery pf his vision. As long as he'd kept her at a distance, she'd still resembled the little girl he remembered, the child he'd needed her to be. It'd been easier for him that way, and he'd thought it'd been easier for her, too.

But maybe it hadn't been.

No, he thinks as he stands outside this godforsaken green door(_and green is the color of sickness and of death, _he thinks, or was until the hospitals went to white linoleum and wood-surfaced doors; hell, good old Trinity Memorial is glass in places. Green is the color of disease, and that's still true, he figures, because his sister and the rest of these terribly sick people are slumped and hunkered behind this warped, green fucking door, this green door left cracked to let a wisp of hope inside, or to let the poison seep out onto the hallway and into the bare floorboards of this tenement. Maybe it's the only traces of themselves they'll ever leave. Sam certainly thinks she's invisible, and maybe she is, for all he's seen of her over the years since they'd gone their separate ways, he by choice, and she compelled by the servitude of youth to remain behind for another three years.) No, there's no maybe about it.

A plaintive voice in his head whispers that it isn't his fault, this estrangement. He'd simply grown up, that was all, grown up and made his own life. It's nothing less than the way things are: you grow up and move out, and the orbit of family widens, though it never breaks. He wasn't Peter Pan, and he couldn't stop time and live forever in Never Neverland. He hadn't left Sam for spite, but for necessity, and if the roles had been reversed, she would've done the same.

_Maybe you had no choice but to go, but you sure as shit had a choice on how far to go_, points out a voice that's uncomfortably close to Gavin Moran, his second father and stationhouse rabbi. _You could'a kept in touch more than you did once you ditched the apron strings, but you were a spit-and-polish cadet, obsessed with rules and regulations and desperate to live up to the impossible standards set by your old man, to exceed 'em where you could. You wanted to make him proud, yeah, but there was a small, shameful part of you that wanted to do better just so you could rub his nose in it a little, show him that he wasn't the only goddamn superhero on the block._

_Sam was getting to be a liability even then, a hellion full of piss and vinegar who flipped off the cruisers as they glided by and who learned to hurl things at the windshields long before she graduated to beer bottles. A few weeks into your trainin', your dad got called to the one-nine because Sam and her buddies had been caught throwing milkshakes and sodas at the patrol cars. The commander let it go as a favor to a fellow officer, but less than a week later, she gets hauled in again, this time for liftin' a couple' Twix bars from a mom an' pop. The CO wasn't gonna let it go that time. A PD princess raisin' a little hell was one thing, but shopliftin' was harder to overlook. Your Pop managed to smooth it over with the store owner by makin' Sam apologize and payin' him twenty bucks in restitution, which was sixteen more than she owed. You've rarely seen your old man so pissed and embarrassed. Sam got grounded for three months, and you suspected,_ though she's never admitted it, that she got a spankin' for the first time in years on top of it.

_None of it seemed to do any good. The more your Pop tried to rein her in, the harder Sam fought. She started cuttin' school, and her grades sank. Her favorite after-school activity was detention, and when your father wasn't runnin' interference at various precincts, your ma was getting on a first-name basis with the school principal. You called home twice a week and visited twice a month, and there wasn't a conversation that went by that didn't touch on Sam and her latest escapade. Your parents were at their wits' end, and you couldn't blame 'em. Sam had always been a wild child, as stubborn and strong-willed as the parents that'd created and raised her and the brother that had preceded her, and she'd discovered rebellion along with the opposite sex, but she'd never been stupidly reckless._ _And she'd never disrespected the PD. She'd come up in a house in the shadow of the badge and had known how dangerous it could be. You couldn't imagine that she'd piss on the institution your old man had served so well and at such cost. The institution you would one day serve. How could she flip off uniforms or pelt patrol cars when you were months away from risking your life on a daily basis in that same uniform?_

_Sam went on raisin' hell, and her exploits made the rounds at the academy. Your father was a legend, and the Flack name was held in reverence by many of the instructors. Zeus in the blue pantheon. They clucked and shook their heads in disbelief and speculated amongst themselves as to how such a celebrated cop and all-around solid guy could turn out such a disappointin' kid._

_Worse yet, they started wonderin' 'bout you, wonderin' if maybe you weren't cut from the same substandard cloth, just another badge baby lookin' to coast on his father's laurels. They rode you hard, peppered you with the hardest questions during lectures and scrutinized every slip and wrong answer._ _Workouts and defense and restraint training were microcosmic hells. You got paired up with the biggest, meanest motherfuckers in the class and got the shit kicked out of you on a regular basis. You were a walkin' bruise for weeks on end, and more than once, you were treated to an "accidental" kick in the jewels that left you tryin' not to puke your cafeteria lunch all over the exercise mat. If they weren't kickin' you in the nuts, they were runnin' you until you were rubber-legged and nauseated, staggerin' to your dorm room and prayin' you could make it to semi-privacy of your room before your legs cramped and you wound up writhin' on the floor, a tweaker in the throes of a bad acid trip. Most nights, you studied with a book in one hand, a bag of ice in the other, and Ben-Gay smeared over your knees and calves in a greasy, pungent sheen._

_It wasn't just the instructors who rode you about her, either. Gossip thrives within the walls of the academy, lichen on damp stone. Cops have more in common with the coffee klatches of elderly New York pensioners than they'd care to admit, and they're constantly chewing the fat in the locker room or shooting the shit in the patrol cars to pass the time. The cadets did most of their off-the-record bullshitting in the cafeteria over trays of limp salad greens and unidentified lumps of congealing, grey meat or in the classrooms before the instructors arrived to distract them with mind-boggling lists of departmental codes and a lexicon of cop talk written in chalk dust and marker. They might not'a been familiar with the chapter and verse of your old man's legacy, but they knew he was a big shit, and they knew you were supposed to be a chip off the old block, so they were only too eager to needle you about your wayward sister._

_You laughed it off as best you could because you understood that getting pissed off would just be blood in the water, but deep down, you resented Sam for making your training that much harder. It wasn't bad enough you had to compete with the legend of the great Don Flack, Sr. Now you had to contend with the embarrassing exploits of your baby sister, who was earning her street cred stripes by chucking soda bottles at patrol cars and telling her new circle of friends that she loved the taste of a good BLT. You were caught between an impossible standard on one side and a sterlin' example of how not to do it on the other, and sometimes the pressure of livin' between the two made it hard to breathe._

_Every black mark against Sam was another hurdle you had to clear. Good was suddenly not good enough. You had to be excellent, head and shoulders above the rest. You memorized the penal code until the afterimages of the text danced in front of your eyes like sunspots and polished your boots until your fingers reeked of bootblack. You practiced self-defense techniques until your already exhausted body threatened mutiny. You practiced with your roommate until he cried uncle, and when he'd had enough, you practiced in front of a full-length mirror, a crazed tai chi fanatic dancing with himself to the strains of The Pogues. And "Red Rain", of course, always "Red Rain", humming in your ears like a message from home._

_There were times when you thought you weren't going to make it. You'd lie in bed with your legs cramping and your solar plexus a bruise that pulsated and throbbed with every indrawn breath and ask yourself what you thought you were doin'. You might not'a been some Ivy League genius, but you could'a gotten into SUNY, or maybe Rutgers. You could'a majored in Business or Finance or gotten a degree in English with your love of readin'. You could'a taught or started a caterin' business. Hell, you could'a gone to culinary school. You'd thought about it for a while when you were younger, before you got bitten hard by the blue flu. You could'a been doin' anything else, and some of it would'a paid better than your impending enlistment to the thin, blue line._

_And then you'd think of your old man and the pride in his eyes whenever he saw you amblin' 'round the house in your academy sweats during a weekend visit, the meaty thump of his hand on your sore shoulders as he patted you on the back, the squeeze of his hand on your nape as he urged you to keep at it. You thought of the way he'd fire a question about police procedure at you as you shuffled downstairs for breakfast on Saturday mornin' or emerged from the shower, toweling the moisture from your damp hair._

_You thought of your mother. She hadn't approved of your decision to join the academy, exactly; in fact, she'd quietly nudged you in the safer direction of culinary school in the hopes of keepin' her baby boy outta the devil's way, but she'd understood it, and once you'd made up your mind to take the more dangerous road, she'd squared shoulders that had already carried your father's heart and ambitions and carried yours, too. She was afraid, but she was rootin' for you, and you couldn't stand the thought of lettin' her down just because the road to bein' a manmade superhero had proven harder than you thought it would. You would rather die than disappoint her with your weakness. You wanted to show her she'd raised a son worthy of the eighteen years plus nine months she'd spent puttin' you together and the name your father had given you with a final, erratic thrust of his hips._

_You thought of the people on the street, the ones you'd one day serve and protect. Right now, they smirked at you as you passed 'em on the street in your cadet uniform. You were nothin' but a punk kid playin' dress up to them, a wannabe with more enthusiasm than experience and more balls than brains. But you knew that come graduation day, they'd see you as somethin' else. The trainin' wheels would come off, and you'd be a cop, that guy, the unseen hero they ridiculed until it was their turn to cry out in the night. Some of the people would mock you, call you a doughnut-scarfin', coffee-swillin' prick who pulled his pud on the city dime and banged hookers in the property room in exchange for a walk on a solicitation charge. Some people-the dirtbags, drug pushers, baby rapers, wifebeaters, and killers-would fear you, and some of those would hunt you, blow out your brains and call it sport or chalk it up to the high cost of doin' business on the streets._

_And some people would see you and number you among God's angels. The lost and downtrodden, the wayward and the wounded, all of them would look to you to make things right, to lift their heavy crosses from their shoulders, or at least make them a little easier to bear. They'd look at you like they looked at your father, as though you held the powers of justice in your hands, stowed them alongside your service pistol inside your holster or tucked them behind your badge. You'd seen that look often as a kid, when you'd gotten to missin' your old man and gone to see him at the stationhouse, where you'd perch on the edge of his desk, feet danglin' bonelessly above the scuffed floor, or sit listlessly in the vomit-green chairs of the break room, doodlin' on a legal pad with a dry Bic and waitin' to steal precious scraps of his attention from the desperate, sad eyes of battered hookers or the haunted, feverish gazes of mothers who'd turned their backs on little Johnny just long enough for the living darkness of the city to rise from the pavement like oily smoke and make him disappear forever. They were scarce, the scraps you managed to wrest from the mouth of human need. The pull of that look was too damn strong._

_It was hope you saw in their faces, naked and savage in its brilliance, and it stirred in you a wide-eyed awe that made your heart flutter against_ _your ribcage._ That's the way they look at Superman, _you'd think as you watched your father sifting through the wreckage of a human life with big, nicotine-stained hands that had suddenly become delicate and gentle. _ That's the way they look at Superman right after he saves the subway car from goin' off the rails.

_Sometimes, it hurt to look at their faces because the hope in them simultaneously exposed and transformed them. It exposed the shadows of old bruises that had receded and submerged their lingering poison beneath the skin and illuminated the minute hairline fractures left behind by life's hardships. The light of hope was a roadmap to all that was unfair and unkind in the world, and it showed you truths no ten-year-old should see, but it also made those careworn faces beautiful, almost lovely. A twenty-five-year-old, smack-addled hooker would look at your old man with a Kleenex wadded in one shakin' hand and tears streamin' down her swollen face, and when the light hit her face just right, you'd catch a glimpse of a seventeen-year-old girl from Omaha who'd come here with big dreams of the bright lights of Broadway and had found only a sad handful of off-off-off-Broadway plays that nobody saw and a human leech in a bad suit who'd promised her the moon in exchange for a few small favors. You'd see them as they'd once been a lifetime ago, before anger and fists had worn them down. Hope was a gift, medicine for the soul that burned away the years of sorrow and bitter disappointment and let them believe, if only for a moment, that everything would be all right. Hope burned brightly and briefly in their haggard, tortured faces, and too often, it was extinguished by the cold, brutal fist of tough-shit reality, but it was beautiful while it lasted, and sittin' in a break room that smelled of salami and stale coffee with a crummy, dyin' Bic in your hand, you envied your old man. Envied and worshipped him._

_That's what made you want to follow in his footsteps. You wanted that power for yourself, coveted it with a fervor that might'a tipped to dangerous obsession if you'd been wired differently. You wanted to bring hope to the broken and put them back together again so that they had a fighting chance at something better. From where you were sittin' a ten years old, it didn't seem so hard; your old man dispensed hope with a pat of his beefy hand and a few words in his gruff, smoke-roughened voice, and it never occurred to you that each pat of his hand or promise spoken over his desk blotter cost him a piece of himself, that the hope that buoyed them weighed him down with its silent obligation. Hope was light, but the promises that gave it were heavy, pressing stones tucked against your heart that often had a habit of rubbin' it raw when you least expected it._

_Those lessons were for later, after the vivid ink of your childhood comic book collection had run to grey and left only blurry images of absolute right and absolute wrong behind. For adulthood and all its bitter heartache. Even if you'd had an inkling of how hard it would be back then, it wouldn't have stopped you because you still believed in superheroes. You were convinced that your old man was a Clark Kent who hid his true identity behind his father-face that sported grey at the temples, and who saved the world every day dressed in a suit and cheap sport coat. And since he was Superman, you were gonna be Superboy and save the world right behind him._

_But mostly, you thought of Sam. She'd looked up to you when she was little, had toddled right behind you on her sturdy toddler's legs across the playgrounds and through the Queens Arboretum. You'd both loved that place as kids. You loved to pretend you were Indiana Jones on the last Last Crusade. You'd wear one of your old man's fishin' hats and use old shoelaces for a whip, and you'd run amok through the hedge maze, killin' cobras and punchin' out Nazi treasure hunters, a hero in your own mind, and no matter how outlandish your tales or improbable your feats, Sam always believed you. And she was always right behind you._

_You'd grown apart as you'd grown up, but you thought that traces of her old faith remained. Bonds of blood were absolute, your father often said, forged by the shared experience of family, and while you questioned a lot of your old man's wisdom, you never questioned that because you carried the truth of it in your bones. Much as you'd fought with your old man durin' the hard, hot years of your comin' of age and strained against the apron strings your ma had so lovin'ly tied around your throat like a cotton umbilical cord, you knew you were your father's son and your mother's pride and joy, and you took comfort in that. A family had its own secret heart, one that only those bound by blood could hear. A family's heart bred its own magic, and that magic never died, no matter how far apart the people in it grew. So you knew that Sam could still hear you even if she wasn't listenin', could still feel the familiar pull of family magic in her veins no matter how desperately she was tryin' to sever the ties that bound. Hell, you still know that now, or else you wouldn't have turned up on her doorstep with "Red Rain" in your hand like the keys to a time machine. She might not have answered the door, but you know she heard you because she's in that dirty little room with the green door, pourin' out her heart to a roomful of strangers with whiskey on her breath and bitterness and regret on her teeth and gums like plaque._

_You thought of Sam, and you stayed despite your achin' ribs and knees and bruised soles because you wanted to be her hero before you were anyone else's. You wanted to show her what was possible for her if she just stuck to her guns and followed her dreams. She didn't have to waste her time hangin' out on street corners with losers and future skels. She could drop them like so many bad pennies under her feet and be whatever she wanted to be. She'd never wanted to be a cop-her contempt for the job had started long before the fires of teenage rebellion had heated the blood in her veins, and you'd shared that hatred, too, once upon a time, when the tempestuous storms of youth had raged and blotted out the sun-but she loved art, loved the smell of graphite shavings and delighted in the fine grit of charcoal on her fingers. She imagined herself the next Grandma Moses or Andy Warhol or Pablo Picasso, with pictures from the canvas of her mind transplanted to the galleries of Soho or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and because you were her older brother, you wanted to stand with your classmates from the academy and shout that it was all possible if she just set her goal and followed you up the mountain. You thought that was your last, best gift to her as her brother, to be a living example to whom she could turn when life got hard in the center and rough around the edges. You thought that was what big brothers did, and you wanted to do it as well as you'd done everything else._

He could laugh now if it weren't for the hot, throbbing constriction in his throat, the one that stings and needles and makes it hard to breathe. Turns out the joke is on him. He's spent the past eleven years patting himself on the back for a job well done, so sure that doing right by the job was doing right by Sam, and all the while, Sam's been smothering under the weight of his success and cursing his name with the breath she has left. He isn't her goddamn hero, after all, and probably never has been. He's been her burden instead, an albatross of unreasonable expectation strung so tightly around her neck that no amount of tugging and clawing at the ties that bind her to him can cast him off. While he'd thought he was leading by example, she'd sought comfort from the burning, poisonous kiss of a liquor bottle, its cool glass beneath her fingers as soothing and reassuring as the clack of rosary beads in the dark silence of a church. He's fancied himself her guardian angel, but as far as she's concerned, he's a demon to be driven out with another sip of Beam or Four Roses.

His mouth floods with a sour, oddly medicinal tang, and he remembers the nasogastric tube he'd woken up with in the hospital after Lessing had lost his mind and blown his guts wide open with a little help from a goddamn copy machine. It had been jammed down his throat like a flaccid, rubber cock, and he'd gagged against the intrusion, mending stomach heaving and spasming in revolt. The bile that had risen to coat his sandpaper tongue had tasted like this, rubbing alcohol and latex gloves. The thought makes his leaden stomach roll dangerously, and he closes his eyes and breathes deeply through his nose. If he pukes out here, someone will come to investigate, and he's too naked to face Sam now. He rocks back on his heels and retreats to the center of the hallway, where it's easier to breathe. He doesn't know why; the air is just as thick with dust and the damp, fetid odor of mildew and old plaster. Maybe it's because he's no longer so close to an open wound.

_Not rubbing alcohol and latex._ He swallows against the taste and scours his teeth with his tongue. _Not that pure. Nope. This is a deeper bitterness, a whiskey bitterness. This is what Sam's mouth tastes like every morning when she wakes up and every night when she goes to sleep or passes out in some squalid nightclub bathroom with her face over a filthy toilet. Rubbing alcohol and latex would be a blessing, unless, of course, she's picklin' her liver with that, too. Legend has it that Kitty Dukakis tipped back the nail polish remover when the booze ran dry. Any port in the storm, I guess. This is fire water and ash, the incense of an exorcism performed one sip at a time._

_I'm the family screw-up. Every family has a black sheep. In mine, I guess it's me._ The words echo inside his head and rise in his throat like bile, and he knows they could suffocate him if they chose, could slither past him lips and lodge in his throat like gristle or well up from his belly in a noxious tide and plug his esophagus with a hot, sour clot of guolt and revelation come too late. His head swims with them, and when he closes his eyes to avert another dizzying wave of vertigo, they're emblazoned in the darkness behind his eyelids like the diseased neon proclamations of flophouse motels. They even blink and flicker in time to his pounding heart, and there's a persistent, insectile buzz at the far edge of his hearing, the snap and hiss of electric voices in the night.

_Out_, insists a frantic voice inside his muddled head, right now. _ If you don't get out now, you'll never leave._

He's sure he won't be able to obey the imperative, sure that Sam's words have robbed him of the ability to flee, that if he tries, he'll simply sink to the filthy floor, boneless and hypotonic until she comes into the hallway and discovers him there, a Pinocchio in reverse who's been turned into a wooden puppet as punishment for his folly. He's also sure that only Sam will be able to break the curse. He'll stay that way, stiff-legged and dead-eyed, until she releases him with the touch of her hand or the magic words to break the spell. And if Sam chooses not to utter them, to hold them in her heart until her anger is spent, then he will be Pinocchio forever.

_Maybe Pop will slip me into Sam's casket when she drinks herself to death, her very own Don dolly to escort her to heaven and keep the demons at bay._

And then he's lurching down the corridor, making a desperate beeline for the thin strip of light thrown by the streetlight just outside the front entrance. If he doesn't reach that thin, flaccid patch of light, he _will_ drown here, smothered by guilt and dust and the rotten, dead-rose stench of ruined lives. Sam's words follow him as he stumbles and staggers toward his sickly, arc-sodium savior, coil, sharp-nailed, pleading fingers around his arms and snatch and claw at the fabric of his coat and pants. His calf sizzles and burns with sudden heat. _That one got me_, he thinks. _They're nipping at my heels, and their teeth are sharp and potent._

_Ba-ba, black sheep, have you any wool?_ he thinks crazily as his feet blunder nervelessly over the threadbare carpet and pound the rotten wood beneath, telegraphing his intrusion with every thundering step. He holds his breath and waits for the door to fly open and disgorge Sam, who will pursue him like an avenging angel, eyes alight with righteous fury and raw with yet another disappointment from her big brother. Then, before he can stop it, a rancid, cynical voice answers. _Yes, sir, yes, sir, one-fifth full._

His breath leaves him in a rush. It's almost a sob, and he's so intent on curling his numb, trembling hands around the cold solidity of the door handle that beckons him that he nearly misses the three steps of the buiding's tiny, miserable landing. His feet find nothing but air, and for an instant, he's suspended in defiance of gravity, Superman frozen in mid-flight by a Kryponite dart. Then, self-preservation overrides his bewilderment, and he scrabbles for the bannister with clawed fingers. The railing is smooth beneath his fingers, oiled by years of anonymous hands. He has time to think that his sister's hands have touched it, too, perhaps in the very spot upon which his nails now dance. Then his fingers find purchase, and he pulls himself upright. The center of the world settles into its rightful place in the soles of his feet, sinks into the hypersensitive flesh like nails, and he grimaces. He clings to the banister and hiccoughs and pants until the newly-restored sense of equilibrium floods his limbs like a shot of Demerol, and then he releases his sweaty grip on the railing and totters through the door and onto the street.

The autumn wind is crisp and cool on his overheated face, and he closes his eyes in mute gratitude and gulps it like water. It burns his throat and stings his cheeks, and it feels so good. He tilts his face skyward and lets the air wash away the grime and despair trapped imside the building like asbestos. He wishes it could wash away the guilt, but Sam's awful declaration clings to his clothes and skin with the quiet tenacity of spidersilk. He doubts even soap could scour him clean. He suspects he'll carry it with him for the rest of his days, a subtle stink beneath the kinder smells of his aftershave and cologne. Most people won't smell it, he supposes, preoccupied as they are with the quiet putrefaction of their own failures; even his friends will miss it, like as not, turned aside by the gaudier reek of decomposition and blood spatter. He'll smell it, though, bitter and pungent as greenbark. And Sam. Always Sam. She's been smelling it for too long already.

He can't be here, but he doesn't know where to go. It would be perverse to go to Sullivan's now, to drown the knowledge of his sister's alcoholism with glasses and shots of that which is killing her by the liquid ounce. He could talk to someone, he supposes, but he doesn't know who. Danny is burdened with his own ghosts and busily banishing them with Lindsay's warmth, and he'll be damned if he'll expose his sister's weakness to Mac's absolutist scrutiny. He needs a friend, not a judge. There's Stella, but there is too much of Mac in her when you least expect it, too much confidence that everything can be fixed if you just apply enough science. He has no appetite for science now. Now he needs a handful of magic and a goddamn miracle.

Neither waits for him on here, and so he walks blindly, away from Sam and her secret confessional. He walks for the simple, cathartic sake of motion. He loses himself to the rhythm, to the swing of his hips and the mindless slap of his feet on the pavement. He never uncouples completely--the cop who patrols the base of his brain won't let him; his brain catalogues each flash of movement, and his ears hum in white-noise anticipation of strange sounds, but he ltes his mind drift, momentarily forgets the faces of the victims currently seeking his solace. He lets his obligations to the city slide from his aching shoulders like a wet mantle.

He even lets Sam go--at least the Sam he left behind in that crumbling tenement. The Sam she'd been once upon a time stayed with him, clung to him with candy-sticky fingers and pouted at him with gloss-smeared lips. The ghost of Cherry Berry gloss wafts to his nostrils, and the pig-tailed Sam of his memory grins up at him.

_Here, Donnie,_ she crows, and holds up a tube of Cherry Berry out to him as though it were a grand prize and not a tube of cheap, dimestore glycerin. _You should try this. Maybe if ya wear it, you could actually kiss a girl._ She sticks out her tongue at him.

_I could if I wanted,_ he thinks wistfully.

_Nu uh. Could not. You got beaver lips_, she retorts with gleeful venom, and dances from view with a haughty swish of pigtail.

He pursues her into the darkness, searching in vain for the sister and the innocence he's lost, but no matter how long his strides, she's always just beyond his reach, a shadow child that flits on the periphery of his vision. He walks until his legs are sore and sprung, until his feet ache from pounding the pavement. He walks until he's spent, and still his mind races. He knows he won't sleep tonight. Odds are, he'll lie on the couch, watching _Mythbusters_ until the explosions on the screen merge with the recollection of his world turning to dust and ash on a sunny Sunday morning in May and he scrambles for the bathroom with his churning guts flooding his mouth. Penance is best performed on his knees, he's found.

He isn't trying to go home, but he isn't surprised when he finds himself across the street from his apartment building. He _is _surprised to see Angell waiting for him, leaning against the side of a department-issue Taurus with her hands in the pockets of her overcoat. She smiles when she sees him, and he freezes where he stands, because she's so beautiful, a goddess of the city, and it makes his chest hurt to look at her. He's not sure what she's doing there at first, and then he remembers. He'd asked her to pick him up in exchange for dinner. He'd hoped for a quiet dinner and some conversation to help him forget today, but no words exist to expunge the memory of Sam's flophouse cofession, and the thought of food prompts a mutinous gurgle from the pit of his stomach.

_I can't let her touch me,_ he thinks dumbly as she approaches with a lovely feline swagger that makes his heart lurch and his cock stir even as the thought forms. _I've got to protect her, keep her clean._

They're face to face and inches apart, and he quashes the urge to retreat. This close, he can smell her perfume and her warm, clean skin, and it intoxicates him. It's so wonderful, so sweet after the stink of stale whiskey and lives gone sour that he wants to bury his nose in her hair or the soft crook of her neck, but he doesn't dare. He's not sure he's earned the privilege of such intimacy yet, and he can't stand the thought of passing his failings to her like secondary transfer.

"Hey, you still need that ride?" she purrs, and twirls her keys around her index finger.

His mouth goes dry. "I think I'm gonna have to walk this off," he says, even though his legs feel like malleable lead beneath his skin.

"All right," she says, and disappointment flickers in her eyes.

He doesn't want to hurt her, doesn't want her to end up like Sam, hollow-eyed and bitter and ruined and cursing his name to a roomful of fallen angels. She's too sweet, too rare a miracle to end up like that. She doesn't deserve to suffer for the folly of letting him into her world. She deserves better, and so, he touches her retreating arm and cups her face and pulls her into a kiss before he can stop himself. It's the simplest apology he knows. Kisses are the magic mothers use to make wounds better, and if he moves quickly enough, maybe she won't rot from the inside out like Sam.

Her lips are spring, and her mouth tastes of winter, and it's all he can do not to tremble as he cups her face. She's too delicate for his clumsy hands, and a stentorian, unforgiving voice hisses that he has no right to this beauty, this pleasure, not after what he's done. It's true, but he can't stop. He has to make it better, to stop his poison before it spreads too deeply and her brothers come knocking at his door with vengeance in their fists.

"Thank you," he says quietly when they part. For the first time since he staggered out of the tenement with his purloined secret, he can breathe.

Angell just smiles and jingles her keys at him. It's an endearing gesture that makes his chest ache, and he's tempted to change his mind and go with her, to forget Sam and cocoon himself in Angell's effortless warmth, but he's forgotten Sam too often and too easily already, and now he's faced with a duty he cannot shirk. So he nods in farewell and turns away from the shelter of home and back to the yawning darkness of the city. His feet hurt and his legs burn. He wants to stop, to curl in on himself and sleep like Little Boy Blue. But Sam is still out there and Peter Gabriel is inside his head, and so he suares his shoulder and resumes his search.


End file.
